Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 4

The universe is a complete unknown to humans. We are not yet able to control and understand the system in which Earth is located, as evidenced by the possible discovery made by a group of astronomers from the University of Taiwan, who suggest that they may have found clues to the existence of a ninth planet.

The Solar System is currently known to be made up of eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, apart from Pluto, which has long been considered a dwarf planet. But one more could join this select group, according to an infrared study carried out between 1986 and 2006.

The work was based on data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the Japanese satellite AKARI, which detected an object moving between 46.5 billion and 65.1 billion miles from the Sun, meaning it would take between 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete an orbit.

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Not only can the drug metformin help to effectively manage type 2 diabetes, it may also give older women a better chance of living to the grand old age of 90, according to new research – thanks, it seems, to a variety of anti-aging effects.

The research used data from a long-term US study of postmenopausal women. Records on a total of 438 women were picked out – half who took metformin for their diabetes, and half who took a different diabetes drug, called sulfonylurea.

While there are a lot of caveats and asterisks to the study, those in the metformin group were calculated to have a 30 percent lower risk of dying before the age of 90 than those in the sulfonylurea group.

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Envision this possible future clinical scenario: a breast cancer patient and her physicians are deciding on the best possible treatment. Their decision is informed by a comprehensive molecular profile of the patient’s cancer samples that predicts the most likely response of the cancer to treatment.

If the profile predicts a high likelihood of a complete positive response and long-term freedom from relapse, then this treatment would be the preferred choice. But if the profile predicts that the tumor would likely be resistant to treatment, alternative treatments must be implemented.

Although this situation is not yet a reality, a team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard has taken significant steps in that direction. They report in Cell Reports Medicine that conducting an integrated proteogenomic profiling of cancer cells, which combines the analysis of DNA, RNA, protein and phosphoprotein data, revealed two novel indicators of tumor response to treatment and alternative therapeutic targets for treatment-resistant HER2+ .

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Humans no longer have exclusive control over training social robots to interact effectively, thanks to a new study from the University of Surrey and the University of Hamburg.

The study, which will be presented at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), introduces a new simulation method that lets researchers test their social robots without needing human participants, making research faster and scalable.

Using a humanoid robot, the research team developed a dynamic scanpath prediction model to help the robot predict where a person would look in a social setting.

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